Using Abstract Language Signals Power

Thus, in Experiment 5 we explicitly and robustly tested two potential mediators of the relationship between language and perceptions of power: perceptions of the respondent as an abstract thinker and perceptions of the respondent as judgmental. As in Experiment 2, participants read descriptions, ostensibly written by different respondents, of a series of behaviors. These written responses described either the concrete means through which the behavior might be accomplished or the abstract ends achieved by completing the behavior. Unlike the previous experiments, language was manipulated between participants, so each participant saw either only concrete descriptions or only abstract descriptions. Some of the behaviors were positive and others were negative, to test whether the effect of language on power judgments, as well as the effects of the two mediators, would be consistent across valence. After reading a behavior/description pair, participants responded to several items measuring perception of the respondent’s power, how much the respondent was an abstract thinker, and how judgmental the respondent was. Given that we used materials for which we already found significant effects of judgmentalness in Experiment 2, we expected judgmentalness to be a significant mediator of the relationship between language and perceptions of power. Thus, since we test a simultaneous multiple mediator model, this experiment serves as a conservative test of the mediating role of perceptions of the respondent as an abstract thinker.

We conducted a series of 2 (valence: negative vs. positive) x 2 (language: concrete vs. abstract) mixed model ANOVAs on ratings of power, abstract thinking, and judgmentalness, with the first factor manipulated within subjects. Means and standard deviations are reported in Table 4. As expected, participants saw respondents who wrote abstract descriptions as more powerful (M = 3.99, SD = 0.66) than respondents who wrote concrete descriptions (M = 3.16, SD = 0.95), F(1, 160) = 42.14, p < .001, η_p² = .21. There was no effect of valence, nor any interaction between valence and abstractness, Fs < 1. Respondents who used abstract descriptions were judged as more powerful than those who used concrete descriptions, regardless of whether the respondent described a positive or a negative behavior.

Participants perceived respondents who wrote abstract descriptions of behaviors (M = 4.38, SD = 0.77) as more abstract thinkers than respondents who wrote concrete descriptions (M = 3.64, SD = 0.96), F(1, 160) = 29.75, p < .001, η_p² = .16. Respondents describing positive behaviors (M = 4.15, SD = 1.13) were also seen as more abstract thinkers than respondents describing negative behaviors (M = 3.86, SD = 1.00), F(1, 160) = 17.07, p < .001, η_p² = .10. These effects were moderated by a significant interaction, F(1, 160) = 39.07, p < .001, η_p² = .20. Respondents who used abstract descriptions were judged as more abstract thinkers than those who used concrete descriptions, regardless of whether the respondent described a positive, F(1, 160) = 61.31, p < .001, η_p² = .28, or a negative behavior, F(1, 160) = 3.91, p < .05, η_p² = .02, but the effect of language was significantly stronger for positive behaviors.

Participants also perceived respondents who wrote abstract descriptions of behaviors (M = 4.25, SD = 0.70) as more judgmental than respondents who wrote concrete descriptions (M = 3.19, SD = 0.87), F(1, 160) = 72.43, p < .001, η_p² = .31. Respondents describing negative behaviors (M = 4.19, SD = 1.18) were also seen as more judgmental than respondents describing positive behaviors (M = 3.25, SD = 0.96), F(1, 160) = 200.05, p < .001, η_p² = .56. These effects were moderated by a significant interaction, F(1, 160) = 63.53, p < .001, η_p² = .28. Respondents who used abstract descriptions were judged as more judgmental than those who used concrete descriptions, regardless of whether the respondent described a positive, F(1, 160) = 12.93, p < .001, η_p² = .07, or a negative behavior, F(1, 160) = 135.79, p < .001, η_p² = .46, but the effect of language was significantly stronger for negative behaviors.

Experiment 6: Converging Evidence for Abstract Thinking and Willingness to Make Judgments as Mediators

The goal of Experiment 6 was to test mediation in a more refined fashion. In Experiment 5, the terms we used to measure participants’ perceptions of judgmentalness (e.g., opinionated, critical) were negative in valence overall. This kind of judgmentalness may only be relevant when a speaker is describing people, especially when these descriptions are negative. Indeed, judgmentalness was a stronger mediator of our effects in Experiment 5 when respondents were describing negative behaviors. However, we are interested in judgmentalness more broadly, as an ability and willingness to make judgments and draw conclusions (cf., Goodwin, Gubin, Fiske, & Yzerbyt, 2000). In Experiment 6, we therefore again tested our multiple mediator model, exploring perceptions of the respondent as an abstract thinker and perceptions of the respondent as someone willing to make judgments as mediators of the linguistic abstraction/power judgment link. This time, however, we modified our judgmentalness measure so it neutrally assessed speakers’ perceived tendencies to make judgments and draw conclusions (i.e., their “willingness to make judgments” rather than negatively tinged “judgmentalness”). We also varied other aspects of the design from that of Experiment 5, using the stimuli from Experiment 4 (instead of those used in Experiments 2 and 5) and a within-subjects design.

More specifically, as in Experiment 4, participants read two persuasive messages, ostensibly written by two different respondents from a previous study, that used either relatively abstract linguistic categories (adjectives and state verbs) or relatively concrete linguistic categories (descriptive action verbs and interpretive action verbs). After reading a message, participants responded to several items measuring perception of the respondent’s power, how much the respondent was an abstract thinker, and how willing to make judgments the respondent was. In contrast to the highly valenced materials involving individuals’ behavior used in Experiment 5, the present materials were designed to be neutral to mildly positive and were about products rather than people, allowing us to explore the applicability of our multiple mediator model to a new context. In Experiment 4, which used the same materials, we did not find significant effects on a single-item measure of judgmentalness, but we expected to find effects on the more nuanced, neutral measure of willingness to make judgments in the present experiment.

As predicted, participants judged the abstract respondent (M = 4.40; SD = 0.90) as more powerful than the concrete respondent (M = 3.99; SD = 0.84), F(1, 123) = 19.91, p < .001, η_p² = .14. Participants also perceived the abstract respondent (M = 5.06, SD = 0.83) as a more abstract thinker than the concrete respondent (M = 4.83, SD = 0.97), F(1, 123) = 7.19, p = .008, η_p² = .06. Finally, participants also perceived the abstract respondent (M = 5.47, SD = 0.95) as more willing to make judgments than the concrete respondent (M = 5.13, SD = 0.99), F(1, 123) = 13.72, p < .001, η_p² = .10.

General Discussion

Across multiple manipulations and measures, we find converging evidence that a more abstract communication style serves as a power signal. Use of abstract language that captured the gist or meaning of an event led a speaker to be perceived as more powerful, relative to concrete language that focused on specific details and actions, regardless of whether the speaker was discussing a person, a societal issue, or a product; describing something negative or positive; or saying a few words or several sentences. Although in some of the individual experiments there were independent effects of abstract language on judgments of warmth and competence, these were inconsistent and often moderated by valence. A persistent, unmoderated effect of abstract language was found only for judgments of power.⁸

Theoretical Implications

From a conceptual perspective, the current findings contribute to our understanding of social judgment more broadly, and to the link between abstraction and power more specifically. Our results are in line with, and therefore help to further bolster, a behavioral signal approach, which has suggested that behavioral patterns associated with particular positions or personality characteristics may serve as a cue to observers that an individual possesses that position or personality characteristic (e.g., Hall, Coates, & Smith LeBeau, 2005; Magee, 2009; Puts et al., 2006, 2007). Moreover, our findings point out that these associations can be relatively fluid; that is, a person may associate not just single behaviors (e.g., speaking with a lower-pitched voice), but also styles of thinking or acting that imply a broad set of behaviors, with a given characteristic (e.g., power), and then make associated judgments regarding that characteristic based on the presence of one of those behaviors. In the current context, specifically, we expected that people associate power with abstract thinking and would therefore be sensitive to indicators of abstract thinking when making judgments about power. We focused on one critical area where abstract thinking is likely to be especially evident to an observer—abstraction in linguistic communication—and found that this impacted power judgments. We expect that other indicators of abstract thinking (e.g., increased focus on goals and other defining aspects; broad, stereotypical thinking) would likewise have a similar impact.

Support for the centrality of abstraction per se to the current results emerges from several aspects of the findings we report. First, we operationalized abstract language in a variety of ways across the current studies, applying different existing frameworks for how language can be more concrete or abstract (e.g., Semin and Fielder’s (1988) linguistic categorization model, Vallacher and Wegner’s (1987) action identification model) and supplementing these with additional manipulations informed by an understanding of abstraction as a process that captures the gist of a situation (Trope & Liberman, 2010). Across these different manipulations, results provided converging evidence for a consistent, robust effect of abstract (versus concrete) language on judgments of power. In addition, in Experiments 5 and 6 we measured perceptions of the speaker as an abstract thinker and found that this plays a mediational role in the link between abstract language and judgments of the speaker’s power. We also found in those experiments that perceptions of the speaker’s judgmentalness played a mediational role in this link, but results of some of our other experiments (i.e., Experiments 3 and 4) suggest that the exact role of judgmentalness may be dependent on the particular stimuli and context involved, as well as the type of judgmentalness studied (issues we discuss in more detail in a subsequent section of the General Discussion). While future research may continue to unpack the role of perceived judgmentalness in perceptions of power, the current findings on the whole lend further support to a social distance approach to power (Magee and Smith, 2013), which has conceptualized power as a form of social distance and argued for a causal impact of power on abstract thinking. The present findings suggest that, indeed, people are sensitive to this association, and therefore will make power inferences from indicators of abstract thinking.

The current findings are also conceptually relevant to prior research that has begun to explore inferences perceivers make about speakers based on their linguistic abstraction. Much of this work has been inspired by Semin and Fiedler’s research on the linguistic categorization model (1988), and has therefore particularly focused on differences in using adjectives versus verbs to describe others’ actions. Douglas and Sutton (2006), for instance, found that observers judged a describer who used abstract (rather than concrete) positive descriptions as more likely to be a friend of the person (and less likely to be an enemy), more likely to hold a positive attitude toward the person, and more likely to be attempting to create a positive impression of the person. The converse was found for describers using abstract negative descriptions. Similarly, Reitsma-van Rooijen, Semin, and van Leeuwen (2007) found that this dynamic influenced feelings of interpersonal connection to a describer who characterized one’s own behavior: Participants felt more connected to a describer who used abstract (versus concrete) language to depict the participant’s positive behavior, and less connected to a describer who used abstract (versus concrete) language to depict the participant’s negative behavior. Douglas and Sutton (2010) further expanded on this to suggest that linguistic abstraction influences overall judgments of a describer’s likeability: As we replicated in the current studies, individuals find abstract describers of positive behaviors more likeable and abstract describers of negative behaviors less likeable. Supporting and expanding upon this prior research, the current findings suggest that an even larger set of judgments may be influenced by communicators’ linguistic abstraction. Moreover, our findings demonstrate that a) abstraction may lead to broad main effects on judgments of communicators’ personality characteristic that are not dependent on the communication’s valence (as in Douglas & Sutton, 2010), and b) effects of abstraction on social inference are not limited to the types of contexts focused on by the LCM (use of verbs versus adjectives) but rather extend more broadly to a variety of ways communication can be rendered more versus less abstract.

In Experiment 5, we found that perceptions of the respondent as judgmental and as an abstract thinker were both significant mediators of the relationship between abstract language and perceptions of the respondent as powerful. Our measure of judgmentalness in that study was a set of items connoting the negative tinged aspect of conferring judgment on another person – judgmental, arrogant, etc. Because the stimuli used in Experiment 5 consisted of abstract and concrete descriptions of behaviors performed by another person, and a valenced item becomes more extremely valenced when described abstractly (Trope & Liberman, 2010), abstract respondents were making more extreme positive and negative statements than concrete respondents, and these extremely valenced statements by abstract respondents implied judgments about other people. Thus, the type of negatively tinged judgmentalness items we used to measure this construct was especially appropriate to this context. However, when the single item “judgmentalness” was included in earlier studies (Studies 2, 3a, 3b, and 4), it only sometimes varied across linguistic abstraction condition.

As we noted in our description of Experiment 6, however, judgmentalness does not necessarily need to be a negatively tinged characteristic. That is, the characteristic of being willing to make judgments and reach conclusions can be more neutral in nature, and this type of willingness to make judgments may be a broader potential mediator for effects of linguistic abstraction on power judgments. To explore this, we measured willingness to make judgments in Experiment 6 using more neutral terms, within the context of experimental stimuli that a) described a product, rather than a person, and b) were constructed to communicate highly similar content across linguistic abstraction condition. Results of Experiment 6 support mediation via such willingness to make judgments (as well as mediation via big-picture thinking), suggesting that judgmentalness thus broadly construed is an important driver of the effect of linguistic abstraction on power judgments.

Of course, big-picture thinking and willingness to make judgments are undoubtedly not exclusive mediators of this effect. For example, in real-world contexts an additional potential mediator is that speaking abstractly makes people feel more powerful (cf., Smith et al. 2008), thereby altering aspects of their non-verbal communication, which in turn affects the degree to which others see them as powerful. While the current studies were not designed to explore this possibility, it would be interesting to do so in future research. More generally, this points to the possibility that other processes contribute to the current effects (indeed, results of Experiment 6 supported partial rather than complete mediation), and the important caveat that the exact role of potential mediators across different linguistic content and different contexts requires further clarification.